Patrick Swayze: Ballet Boy

JEFFERY Taylor, who started dancing at the age of 11, pays tribute to the talented actor and dancer Patrick Swayze and wonders if it was his dance training that gave him the strength to fight his battle with cancer.

With Jennifer Grey as Baby in his best-known role as Johnny Castle in the 1987 movie Dirty Dancing []

Last week I set eyes on one of the most tragic, inspiring photographs of a human being I have ever seen.

Taken a few weeks before his death it showed 57-year-old Patrick Swayze in the final stages of pancreatic cancer.

He was picking up lunch from a Los Angeles fast food café. A trademark stetson, essential for this dedicated cowboy, was partnered by a healthy new goatee and a loose waistcoat, and you can still see the swing in his step.

What triggers the heartbreaking lurch in the gut, though, are the tubes and other medical paraphernalia trailing across his body. The image resonates with a relaxed but steely determination to carry on, an ordered regime in the face of impending chaos and an elegant, modest acceptance of the nature of his fight for survival.

High achiever Swayze in Dirty Dancing

I am a passionate believer in the values embedded in the classical ballet technique and I like to think that, similar to my own experience as an 11-year-old, the life-affirming confidence quietly radiating from that picture was absorbed in the dance studio by the young Swayze.

“You can see his classical background in Dirty Dancing,” says Royal Ballet principal dancer Edward Watson. “It’s in the carriage of his head and the way he moves his arms.”

Swayze’s performance as dance instructor Johnny Castle in the 1987 film shot him to worldwide stardom and earned him the first of three Golden Globes. The movie was a low-budget project that became a surprise international hit.

You can see Swayze’s classical background in Dirty Dancing. It’s in the carriage of his head.

Swayze, born on August 18, 1952 in Houston, Texas, started ballet lessons as soon as he could walk, taught by his mother, former dancer Patsy Yvonne Swayze, at her dance school.

His father, Jesse Wayne Swayze, was a champion rodeo cowboy. The family, including brothers Don and Sean and sisters Vicky and Bambi, was steeped in showbusiness .

“Our mother made us feel that we were never good enough,” Swayze remembered. “I had to be the best. All the love came from our father. My mother was the driven one while he wore his heart on his sleeve.”

A dancer’s short career is spent striving for physical perfection, which many admirers feel that Swayze came sensationally close to achieving.

His amazing coordination could only have been honed by years of conquering the cruelly difficult exercises leading to the wonders performed by Russian legends like Rudolf Nureyev and Irek Mukhamedov. Swayze’s double tours, two turns in the air, performed just before the famous lift at the film’s end, is impeccable.

Emotionally, however, Patsy’s legacy to her eldest child was a sense of personal failure, endured for the rest of his life and evidenced in his repeated involvement with cocaine and alcohol.

“It must have been hell in a family like that,” observes Watson, 33, who started dancing aged three and entered the Royal Ballet Junior Boarding School at 11. “Your dance teacher must be objective and ruthless so if she’s also your mother it must be a nightmare. ”

Like many young male ballet students facing taunts about the alleged sexual proclivities of those who prance about in tights, Swayze decided to prove himself in football, gymnastics and ice-skating.

His first professional dancing job at 18 was as Prince Charming in a Disney on Parade ice show. He hated it and went back to his mother’s studio and to his first love, classical ballet. By that time, his mother’s star pupil was a girl called Lisa Niemi, also a classical dancer, and Swayze fell passionately in love.

He was invited by dance director Eliot Feld to join a classical group, the American Ballet Players, later rechristened the Eliot Feld Ballet, as principal dancer and performed many of the great classical roles in New York, the company’s home city.

Niemi joined him and together they studied at the Harkness and Joffrey Ballet Company schools, both then based in Manhattan.

Niemi and Swayze married in 1975 and she was at the bedside of her husband of 34 years when he died.

His dancing days were virtually over when, aged 38, he made his next hit movie, Ghost, with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg in 1990. Yet his lyrical physicality and focused emotions precisely echo roles such as the troubled Albrecht in the great romantic tragic love story, Giselle.